Sidetracks
Richard Holmes HarperCollins, 420pp, £19.99
ISBN 0002555786
Richard Holmes is perhaps best known for his admirable two-volume life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and for Footsteps, his delightfully quirky meditation on the nature of biography. He has also written at length about Shelley and about Dr Johnson and his dissolute companion, Richard Savage. Now, in Sidetracks, which collects an array of shorter pieces, Holmes considers the figures whose numinous or suggestive presences have deflected his attention as he has chased the sprite-like form of biographical truth - biography, in Holmes's view, is not a drily academic act of excavation, but rather an exciting pursuit, a quest.
Holmes's method varies from piece to piece, reflecting 30 years of intimate inquiry and personal response. Thus, alongside conventional essays in biography, we find radio dramas about Shelley and Girard de Nerval, and a short story about Dr Johnson and his cats. The cast of characters is diffuse. Holmes offers impressions of Thomas Chatterton, the precocious young master of poetic forgery, and the Gothic eccentric Charles Maturin; William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; Voltaire and Boswell; F Scott Fitzgerald and his mental and financial crises; and the unpredictable photographer Felix Nadar, who set up the Society for the Promulgation of Heavier Than Air Machines.
These various sketches are interspersed with a series of auto- biographical vignettes, in which Holmes pursues his favourite theme - the magnetic pull and strange vicissitudes of his work as a writer of other men's lives. In these sketches, he repeatedly asserts the truths that "biography is a human exchange" or "a handshake across time"; the suspicion that "empathy is the most powerful, the most necessary, and the most deceptive, of all biographical emotions"; and the awareness of mankind's innate need "to find the self in the other, not always to be alone". These reflections point to one essential conviction: that the value of biography lies in its capacity for illuminating all human lives by shedding light on one.
Holmes's most biographically minded subject, Dr Johnson, believed that "the business of a biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life". Although less prescriptive than his famous predecessor, the author of Sidetracks is similarly addicted to these telling minor details. He notes in passing Voltaire's interest in women's underwear, Byron's habit of sleeping en papillote (that is, in paper curlers), and Boswell's education in the art of fencing at the hands of a 94-year-old instructor.
Holmes suggests that "the partial collapse of the large, naturalistic novel . . . has left an immense hunger for the large, naturalistic biography". His own work satisfies this hunger; his narratives abound with outrageous, mock-Dickensian characters. Of these, the most extraordinary may well be Scrope Davies, who combined the life of a university don with a ruinous career as a gambler. Davies, who was worth £50,000 in 1816, kept a betting book that reveals his insatiable appetite for wagers: "Won at shooting - five shillings. Lost at billiards - ten shillings. Lost at fishing - five shillings. Won at throwing stones - 18 shillings. Lost at chicken driving - £1." When Davies died, he left nothing behind save a small trunk, which he had bequeathed to the care of his creditors. The trunk remained unopened until 1976. Unlocked, it turned out to contain "a sort of miniature Pompeii of the late Regency period" - white kid evening-gloves; a lock of hair from the head of the society beauty Lady Frances Webster; tailor's bills for tennis shoes and red lounge slippers; collections of aphorisms; 20 letters from Byron; and two previously unpublished poems by Shelley.
Exhuming forgotten figures such as Scrope Davies, and viewing better-known ones from unfamiliar angles, Holmes makes the past exciting and, at the same time, imbues it with a certain tutelary usefulness. In his essay on Voltaire, he quotes Flaubert's remark that "every lawyer carries inside him the wreckage of a poet". Reading Sidetracks, one senses that, occasionally, a biographer can carry inside him this same poetic craving - not stifled or wrecked, however, but breathing and intact.
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